Do I trust cloud services? That's a multi-faceted question with equally multi-faceted answers
I don't really trust anything I don't directly operate myself, and even then I recognize that there are inherent limitations present in my own capabilities.
That said, I trust the cloud services
enough to use them for non-critical stuff like these sites. It's a simple cost-benefit tradeoff: I trade running my own show for access to much larger and more robust infrastructure than what I'm willing to pay for.
In order to provide a truly high quality and trustworthy service you need dedicated servers in a reputable datacenter with multiple transit carriers and a team of engineers who know their stuff. All under your control. I do that IRL. That costs a lot of money, but on the flipside the fate of the service is thoroughly on me. The sort of money I blow on achieving
that last nine in my day job is absolutely out of the question for low- or no-revenue sites like these.
Mind you, if you're willing to play fast and loose you can run a fairly reliable service with just a single server on a consumer-grade DSL connection. Most of the time it works. Sometimes it doesn't, and then it sucks. Been there; done that. You also still have to accommodate for power and network outages, or physical moves to a different town, which introduces cost and complexity into the whole setup.
On the other hand, there's this bunch of folks out there on the Internet who have built large infrastructures who are happy to lend you a slice of it. You get a fair bit of the benefits of a large infrastructure for reasonable
opex and no
capex whatsoever.
You just have to recognize the platform's inherent limitations. IOW, you don't trust it implicitly with your data. You avoid relying on the platform for all of your data. You store none of your critical data on it. You avoid storing sensitive data on it, and you
assume it's going to get whacked at some point or another, and figure out whether you can live with it when it does happen.
This sort of circles back to what you mentioned about the targeted hacks. I'm pretty confident that if this site, or these servers, were subjected to a true targeted attack, we'd get whacked. Were that to happen, we'd just look at the logs -- which we store off-server in real time -- fix the vulnerability that got us whacked, and move on. There's no sensitive data on these servers -- even your passwords are stored as one-way hashes of the real password -- so the only thing we'd lose is being bad netizens, spewing bot-traffic at the Internet at large, until we whacked and re-built the servers from scratch.
In the final analysis, it's all an attempt at the lowest possible cost for maximum possible performance and minimum possible management overhead
You always trade off something.
I try to trade off the bit that's most irrelevant.
And users always come first. If they don't, they go elsewhere.
~K
BTW, I do remember the gentoo-wiki going belly-up. It was sad, too, because that wiki had some
real useful info on making the HP-proprietary bits of ACPI on HP 2710p work on linux.
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Topic: short question and testing 123 (Read 9936 times)